Perth woman faces difficult choice in her search for missing daughter

Zev Singer, Ottawa Citizen01.02.2013

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

Facebook photos of Emma Fillipoff, 26, of Perth, who has gone missing on Vancouver Island. She was last seen Nov. 28 in Victoria. A Facebook page has been set up to try to help find her. https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff
/ Facebook

OTTAWA — Shelley Fillipoff, the Perth woman who has been searching the streets of Victoria, B.C. for her missing daughter for the last five weeks, is now facing the awful decision of whether to continue her search on the west coast or come home.

Emma Fillipoff, 26, has been missing since Nov. 28. Those who know Emma in Victoria believe that at the time of her disappearance she was in danger of taking her own life, but her mother has searched on, combing the city for even the smallest clue.

Emma, a trained chef, had been in a fragile emotional state and was living in a shelter. Shelley told the Citizen in mid-December that she decided to fly to Victoria after a series of phone calls in which her daughter alternated between asking for help and pushing it away.

“For every phone call that said, ‘I need your help. Would you come?’ there was at least one that followed that said, ‘No, no, please don’t. Let me do this by myself, Mum. I need to figure things out.’ And I respected that,” Shelley said in December.

On Nov. 28, after hearing a change her daughter’s voice, she decided that her daughter needed her. She lied, promising Emma she wouldn’t come, but then bought a plane ticket.

At 11 that night she arrived at the Sandy Merriman House, but was told Emma had left the shelter five hours earlier.

Shelley couldn’t find her, and Emma has not been seen since. All of her possessions, however, including her laptop, her passport and recently borrowed library books, were found inside the 20-year-old Mazda Emma drove.

Emma has no previous history of disappearing, no criminal record and no history with drugs.

When Shelley got to Victoria, she worked hard to set up a network of people who know Emma and to carefully record all leads and follow them up. She has worked with the police and has been postering the city. Strangers have stepped forward to help — the Citizen story in December alone was shared on Facebook more than 4,000 times.

But by now, after five weeks of daily searching and co-ordinating, the leads have been exhausted.

“We have nothing, we have absolutely nothing,” Shelley said Tuesday night from Victoria. “We have no leads, we have no clues. We just don’t know what’s happened.”

Shelley didn’t come home to Perth for the holidays.

“I spent Christmas in bed,” she said.

And what’s really tough, she said, is the choice she’s headed for.

“I know that I’m going to have to make a decision one of these days, to go home — because nothing’s happening here,” she said.

What keeps her there is the knowledge that when a lead does turn up, she is able to respond and follow up more quickly than the police can. She doesn’t mean that as a criticism; the police have a whole city to take care of, while she has only this one all-consuming, full-time pursuit.

Her actual job, as an elementary school teacher, has like the rest of her life been on hold. She says her principal has been very supportive, but she knows there will be a limit to how long the situation can last.

“People have pointed out to me at some point I might be facing having to sell my house or something, I suppose. I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t know. I just focus on Emma. I don’t really think in terms of anything but finding Emma.”

She said that while she takes into account that she has other adult children back home that she wants to be with, she doesn’t want money to be a factor in the search for her daughter.

“I can’t allow that to interfere,” she said.

She said she hates the idea of giving up on Emma.

“It’s going to be a very hard decision. It’s going to be a very hard thing for me to do to leave here, because I feel like I’m leaving her.”

She said she will probably give herself another few weeks before she comes back. Yet, even if she does, she is not giving up on the idea that Emma will be found.

“I have to stay optimistic. I don’t have a choice ... I don’t have the ability to go anywhere else. I don’t have the emotional ability or strength to go anywhere down a road that’s not optimistic.”

The Facebook page that co-ordinates the search for Emma can be found at: facebook.com/HelpFindEmmaFillipoff.

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